It seems that Google was in the mood for another Adwords Slap heading into this weekend. Reports of the effects of this latest Slap started surfacing in forums Friday evening. This ineveitably sent me scurrying off to check my active campaigns in Adwords for any signs of being abused by the Big ‘G’.
Out of 25 campaigns, only one ad group in one campaign was slapped, and it was for a fairly competitive set of keywords. This particular ad group didn’t receive many impressions or clicks so it wasn’t a major hardship to shut it down. The rest of my campaigns, as of this moment, remain untouched (knock on wood).
To be honest, I didn’t encounter the expression “Don’t Leave Money On The Table” until I was working for a very small startup about 5 years ago. The expression struck me as amusing since who would be silly enough to or wealthy enough for that matter to just leave money behind?
It brought to mind the image of robber barons lighting cigars with $100 bills.
Working for a tiny startup company gave me unique access to the CEO and strategy meetings that usually focused on sales and marketing. They weren’t the typical discussions centering around technical issues that I was used to participating in as an engineer.
In a previous post I mentioned an affiliate program that didn’t treat affiliates very well. At least I didn’t feel that I, as an affiliate, was given proper consideration. However, the affiliate program, which I didn’t mention by name, is one of my best performing merchants. I still don’t think it’s right to put up with poor treatment even if a merchant’s affiliate program pays you well, but I won’t reject them either and I still haven’t given up trying to get some basic concessions along with some basic courtesy from this particular merchant.
One of the things that has helped Jeremy Palmer of “Quit Your Day Job” and now “PPC Classroom” rocket to the top of the affiliate marketing world is the relationships he’s been able to establish with the merchant’s he promotes so successfully.
By building this rapport, he has set himself up to receive very favorable treatment from his merchants in the form of relaxed restrictions on trademark bidding, special offers for his visitors, and probably most importantly, increased commission payouts, which in turn allow Jeremy to outbid his competitors in the PPC search engines and still make out handsomely.
One of the initial steps to profiting from promoting ClickBank products is to find a product that converts. Of course, the first step is identifying a hungry market, but assuming that you’ve already found one, here is the method I use to qualify CB products that I will promote.
A lot of emphasis is placed on the gravity metric for CB products. You can read about what gravity actually is over at CB, but it shouldn’t be the only metric you use to qualify a product. For instance, a newly listed product in ClickBank will have a very low gravity just because it hasn’t been promoted much by affiliates. This doesn’t tell you anything about the quality of the product nor its potential to convert into sales. You’ll need to dig in a little deeper.
